Tomb Raider Composer Makes Buzzy Music With Honeybee Orchestra

Easily bored composer Troels Brun Folmann has recorded propane-tank drums, stomach growls, squeaking bicycle brakes, wind in the trees and the spanking of girlfriends in his perpetual quest for unique sounds.

But his bravest exercise in offbeat field recordings came about when he overcame a longstanding “love-hate” relationship with honeybees in order to transform the buzzing of a backyard hive into a digitally manipulated piece of dance music.

“I have been stung over 100 times, which led me to believe that I emitted some crazy pheromone that instantly upsets these mighty insects,” the Danish-born composer told Wired.com in an e-mail. “To test my theory and overcome my apiphobia, I deliberately placed myself in this bee garden and started noticing all the beautiful sounds they make.”

As the video above demonstrates, Folmann waded into the swarm with a handheld recorder, then tweaked raw audio of the insects’ buzz with a variety of computer tools. For example, Folmann digitally manipulated the sound of wing movements by radically slowing down the bees’ 215-beats-per-second vibrations.

Tech specs: Folmann shot the bee video on a Canon SX1is camera and recorded sounds on a portable Zoom H4N. In the studio, he transformed the raw audio into music with Sound Forge, Kontakt and free Paulstretcher software. The latter “allows you to freeze a segment of time so you can essentially make a one-second recording into an hour-long sound by stretching the time instead of pitching it down,” said Folmann, who used Glitch to create percussive effects.

“I recorded the flaps in high resolution and tuned them down to the degree where I could hear the individual wing flaps,” he said. “I used those to create the bases of the rhythms.”

Folmann then equalized and filtered the sound to fit in with conventional instrumentation, including drums, strings and human voices.

Folmann’s ear for oddball sound sources has earned him a niche as one of Hollywood’s go-to sound designers. Through his Tonehammer and The Eighth Dawn companies, Folmann has created weird sound effects for films including Avatar, Transformers 2 and 2012 along with the TV series True Blood and the Tomb Raider videogames.

From his home base in San Francisco, Folmann pounces quickly when he senses a unique sound is in the offing — even if it means recording bizarrely personal experiences.

“The most extreme [recording] was a very unfortunate incident with spaghetti meatballs a couple of years ago,” Folmann recalled. “I got a severe amount of food poisoning and decided to record the entire thing. The body is capable of producing rather strange sounds under severe pressure. The end result was this awesome-sounding synth sound that made it into a couple of blockbuster movies.”

Folmann composes music for Tomb Raider videogames.Image courtesy EidosAs for the Music Made With Bees project, Folmann — who’s offering the .rar sound file for free download — says there’s been one unexpected side effect: He now worries that the live sound of bees at work may become a thing of the past.

As reported in the documentary film Colony, bee populations are dwindling at an alarming speed.

“The project was primarily about overcoming my own phobia of bees and figuring out how deep I could get into the sound, but in hindsight,” Folmman said, “I appreciate its relevance and importance in context to the discussions about the environment and importance of keystone species like bees.”